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In the category of: They aren’t that expensive.
Citing Costs, Police Departments Drop Use of Body Cameras
The fact that body cameras are being dumped in smaller departments is significant. As the Post notes—drawing data from their own police shooting database—fatal police shootings occur more frequently in small communities than they do in urban areas with high crime rates. It writes:
Of the 1,800 departments that have reported a fatal officer-involved shooting since 2015, nearly 1,300 were smaller departments with 50 or fewer officers.
It’s impossible to ignore the implications here: Much of the impetus for police departments to acquire body cameras has come as a direct result of high-profile officer-involved shootings—particularly involving black men. The cameras were intended as a way of bridging a chasm of trust between police and non-white communities, and a way of creating transparency and accountability around cases of alleged officer misconduct.
In the category of: The changing tide of the map.
When Will GOP Lawmakers Finally Break With Trump? These Four Kansas Defectors May Provide the Answer.
The Republicans changed parties as suburban districts like theirs move away from the GOP.
On December 19, Clayton left the party she had belonged to since she was a teenager and registered as a Democrat. She was one of four women in the Legislature, all from the Kansas City suburbs, who quit the GOP within the span of a week last month. There’s no record of so many defections in such a small period of time in Kansas. But there’s also little precedent—perhaps not since the political realignments of the 1960s—for the rapidity with which voters in suburban districts across the United States have gone from voting for Republicans to voting against them.
Over the last two years, Clayton felt her constituents moving away from the GOP, and particularly from President Donald Trump. “I had to spend a great deal of my energy apologizing for things that Trump said or did,” she says. “Which meant that I was apologizing every 15 minutes because of how many terrible things he says and does.”
In the category of: The opposite of fixing healthcare.
The Uninsured Rate Is The Highest It’s Been In 5 Years
The Affordable Care Act brought the share of Americans without health insurance to a historic low. Things have changed since Donald Trump became president.
About 7 million fewer Americans had health insurance at the end of last year compared with two years prior, and the share of people who are uninsured is the highest it’s been since 2014, according to a new survey.
During the fourth quarter of 2018, 14 percent of Americans were uninsured. That’s up from 11 percent at the end of 2016, and the increase has been steady over the months since then, according to the latest figures from the Gallup National Health and Well-Being Index, released Wednesday. Women, people who earn less than $48,000 a year and adults younger than 35 saw the highest increases in the uninsured rate.
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